Sen. Jeff Merkley announces "Keep It in the Ground" legislation. On his right is tribal leader
Tara Zhaabowekwe Houska, with co-sponsor Sen. Bernie Sanders peering over Merkley's shoulder.
Flanked by Sierra Club president Aaron Mair, tribal rights attorney Tara Zhaabowekwe Houska, and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, Sen. Jeff Merkley and Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation Wednesday to stop issuing leases to extract fossil fuels from on- and off-shore federal lands. Titled the Keep It in the Ground Act, the bill would also terminate all existing federal leases that are not producing. Co-sponsors of the legislation are Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer, Ben Cardin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Patrick Leahy, and Elizabeth Warren.
Behind the legislation is a simple message: When the common good depends on our adapting to and ameliorating the impacts of climate change, it makes no sense for public land meant for that common good to continue as a source of the fuels that are driving global warming. You can read the legislation here.
Standing with a crowd of supporters near the Capitol in Washington, Sanders and Merkley praised the aggressive grassroots environmental movement that has been at the forefront of climate change activism, including opposition to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that looks closer than ever to extinction.
The two senators and Mair also spoke about ensuring that workers in the fossil fuel industry are not left behind. Merkely said their legislation, in particular, and fighting climate change, in general—by ending the extraction and burning of fossil fuels—should not be an exercise in green vs. blue. Ours, he said, "must be a green and blue movement" with eco-activists working side by side with workers in the transition to renewable energy sources now underway.
Sanders said we have a "moral responsibility" not to bequeath a planet to our kids and grandkids "that is unhealthy and in some cases uninhabitable." You can't just "talk the talk" and then support extracting huge amounts of oil and gas from federal lands, he declared.
There's more below.
Mair, who has been president of the Sierra Club since May, said what is needed is a "green TARP" for fossil fuel workers, referencing the 2008 bail-out of financial institutions. Activists need to push a fully funded clean-green energy transition that protects workers, he added. He recommended "retooling" America just as was done to defeat the Axis powers during World War II. Houska, a member of the Couchiching First Nation, spoke in favor of the legislation, noting that indigenous people have been in the forefront of the climate change fight because they are among the most affected by those changes and by the extraction of fossil fuels.
McKibben said if the effort had started a long time ago, transitioning to a clean-green, climate-friendly world would have been easier. But, he lamented, starting decades ago was hindered because "there was a disinformation campaign" concocted by fossil-fuel interests to persuade people that global warming wasn't really happening. This profit-motivated propaganda has led us, he said, to a world in which we have just now seen the highest wind speeds ever recorded in a storm in our hemisphere and a hurricane in Yemen that produced 10 years' worth of rain in two days. Failure to take action on climate change, he said, has produced "instability and danger" which we now see in the "constant ongoing testimony of Mother Nature."
In a Wednesday press call about the Keep It in the Ground Act, Merkley said:
“This bill is about recognizing that the fossil fuel reserves that are on our public lands should be managed in the public interest, and the public interest is for us to help drive a transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy future. We don’t have a lot of time to do this, so there’s an urgency to it, and a place that’s readily available for us to act is on the fossil fuels that are on our public lands.”
He
noted that experts believe that 80 percent of global coal reserves, one-third of oil reserves, and half of global natural gas reserves must remain buried if we are going to limit the world's average warming to 2°C. Keeping the oil and gas on federal land in the ground would help meet this goal, he said.
The Center of American Progress and the Wilderness Society have concluded that about 20 percent of the U.S. greenhouse gases come from extracting fossil fuels from public lands and burning them. The Bureau of Land Management estimates that 279 million acres of federal lands contain an estimated 31 billion barrels of oil and 231 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Franz Matzner at the Natural Resources Defense Council praised the proposed legislation:
Phasing out coal, oil and gas development on federal lands and waters is another part of this broader strategy to move beyond the dirty fuels of the past before the window to address climate change closes. Current extraction of fossil fuel from federal lands and waters accounts for nearly one-fourth of all emissions in the United States. Yet the fossil fuel industry continues to be granted preferential access to publicly owned resources, even as the science tells us we have already discovered far more fossil fuels than can ever be burned if we are serious about avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.
Senator Merkley's legislation would replace this vicious cycle with a virtuous circle, simultaneously preserving our public lands and waters, curtailing long-term investment in fossil fuel use, and accelerating the transition to clean energy. It sends a long-term market and political signal that the United States believes there is a better way to power the future. That we don't need to keep despoiling our last remaining pristine oceans and landscapes because decades from now our children will be fueling their homes, cars, and economy with clean, renewable energy, not coal, oil, and gas.
Nobody knows the obstacles in Congress that face this legislation better than Merkley and Sanders. As Merkley says, we should not hold our breath hoping that it will even get a committee hearing. Getting the Keep It in the Ground Act as well as other productive climate change-related legislation onto the nation's agenda and the president's desk—this president's or the next one's—will require a vigorous grassroots movement of millions.
This effort would be mightily helped if the media would ask every candidate for public office, Democrat or Republican—from city councils to state legislatures to Congress—whether they agree climate change has created what Sanders calls a "major, major, major" crisis and if so, what they propose to do to meet the challenges that crisis presents. Anybody who blows off such questions or treats them as a side issue is worthy of progressives' disdain, not our support.